The global waste and resource crises necessitate and give great impetus for better and more sustainable management of waste. Increasingly, resource and waste streams that once were sent to landfill or incinerated are now reused, recycled, or recovered. Yet, while many laws and policies have been adopted for this very purpose, a number of recurrent challenges persist across interventions seeking to further facilitate the necessary, widespread transitions to sustainable waste management. This perspective article explores the suitability of blockchain technology in overcoming these challenges. In particular, we discuss the opportunities and challenges for blockchain in (1) offering clarity in property rights of products and wastes, (2) supporting law and policy goals by incentivizing sustainable waste management, and (3) maintaining anonymity and privacy for institutions and individuals.
Arghavan Akbarieh, William Carbone, Markus Schäfer, Danièle Waldmann · 5 authors
Despite the enormous amount of raw or secondary materials flowing within the construction industry, the actual available volume of materials and their respective End-of-Lifecycle (EoL) treatment is not regulated nor uniform. On top of that, the EoL responsibility of different stakeholders after the future building deconstruction is confusing and disputable. Consequently, different sustainability policies and […]
Kostas Douladiris, Thomas K. Dasaklis, Fran Casino, Christos Douligeris
Reverse logistics (RL) activities of medical equipment play a crucial role in properly managing durable medical devices at the end of their life. However, refurbishing medical equipment is not a straightforward process, as there exist many challenges associated to their proper re-positioning into the market. In this paper the use of blockchain technology is proposed as a viable solution for establishing sound refurbishing channels for medical equipment while considering relevant regulatory, security and operational prerequisites. In particular, we propose a highly robust traceability mechanism for medical equipment refurbishing activities based on blockchain and smart contracts. Our approach offers multiple and disparate stakeholders (device manufacturers, hospitals, refurbishers, retailers etc.) to share critical RL information in a timely, verifiable and secure fashion. The system provides forensics-by-design functionalities and safeguards the chain-of-custody for all the refurbishing processes taking place. A proof-of-concept implementation is provided as well as a discussion of the various benefits of the proposed RL system.
Abstract Past international trade practices have been associated with opaque information flows that have hindered traceability and created hurdles in hassle‐free trade. Blockchain and allied technologies have been investigated as a panacea for the problems faced by the Cloud‐Based Manufacturing industry. However, previous literature has focused on limited aspects of a typical Cloud‐Based Manufacturing chain, such as monitoring assets and securing traceability, which is widely neglecting data integrity and data access. To overcome such drawbacks, the current paper proposes secure smart contracts based on the ERC20 interface in a permissioned blockchain with relevant processes and functions to obtain a holistic framework for securing Cloud‐Based Manufacturing operations. The efficacy of the proposed framework was demonstrated on the case study. It was found that critical loopholes in a current supply chain can be overcome using the proposed framework. Additionally, several outlines for future research are outlined.
Santosh B. Rane, Shivangi Viral Thakker, Ravi Kant
Purpose Environmental sustainability has become a primary factor for organisations to compete globally. Stakeholders' involvement with necessary commitment at the right stage of supply chain management (SCM) plays a vital role in development of green supply chain. This paper aims to explore the involvement aspect of stakeholders towards greening of the supply chain. The purpose of this paper is to identify the critical success factors for stakeholder involvement in development of green supply chain and develop use cases for managers and practitioners planning to implement recent technologies to support stakeholders' involvement. Design/methodology/approach After a thorough literature survey and interviews with experts from industry and academia, the factors for involvement of stakeholders for greening the supply chain were identified. A survey-based research has been used to collect primary data for effective people involvement in development of green supply chain. The decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory method is used for ranking the critical success factors. Effective implementation of success factors using merits of blockchain and internet of things (IoT) technologies are discussed. Use cases are developed for practitioners for using a blockchain IoT-integrated architecture. Findings The results show that criterion C21 (cooperation with buyer for green initiatives) is the most important for green supply chain, and criterion C5 (global customers) has least effect on greening the supply chain. Involving stakeholders in the green product design ensures improved efficiency of the supply chain. Merits of technologies like blockchain and IoT may be reaped successfully for incorporating critical success factors to develop green supply chain. Research limitations/implications The research can further be extended by developing the research model with hypothesis and conducting a survey for validation. Automobile industry use cases are considered for this research, and it may be further developed for different industry sectors like process industries, service, etc. Practical implications Managers can make use of these 22 critical success factors and capabilities of the blockchain IoT-integrated architecture to successfully involve stakeholders. Practitioners/managers can dramatically change SCM with respect to the response speed, accuracy of decision-making, data acquisition, data storage and data accessibility, transparency, trust-building, opportunity of participation, communication quality, freedom in payment based on blockchain IoT-integrated architecture. Preventing pollution and converting the enterprises into green and sustainable organisations have created lot of concerns worldwide. This research addresses the issue of green initiatives and the role of stakeholders in improving the green status of industry. Originality/value Though there is research on involving suppliers and customers in the supply chain activities, there is a significant delay in integrating human resource management in the supply chain. This research proposes integration of stakeholders using recent technologies for green supply chain. Use cases developed for the automobile industry gives path to future research in this domain.
Supply chain is an entire network of producing and delivering a specific product to a final consumer. Stainless steel is a specific product being delivered on a supply chain. It is not easy to manage and monitor the entire supply chain because a supply chain has high complexity, including various organizations and activities. Due to this difficulty, several issues occur in the process of supplying stainless steel, such as forgery and alteration. Blockchain is a decentralized and distributed ledger technology that specializes in transparency and immutability. Many companies try to introduce this blockchain technology into supply chain management to conveniently monitor their supply chain. Accordingly, the blockchain technology can make steel companies be able to investigate and protect high-quality products from counterfeited low quality products. This paper proposes a design of a blockchain-based stainless steel tracking system to thoroughly track the entire process involved in supplies from stainless steel mills to the final customers. This proposed design is based on the hyperledger fabric which is one of the most popular private blockchain platforms.
M. Poongodi, Mounir Hamdi, V Vijayakumar, Bharat S. Rawal · 5 authors
we have become too dependent on technology owing to which the quantity of e-waste produced at the end of their life cycle has increased at a rapid pace. In later centuries, there would be an equivalent amount of carbon footprint by the smartphone sector as to that of transportation industry. The approximate estimation of the total carbon footprint while taking the other existing abundant electronic gadgets is enormous. Considering the growing volume of e-waste, the possibilities of these non-biodegradable elements contaminating the atmosphere are towering. The e-waste generated in all these recent years is being taken seriously by various nations and effective steps are being taken to overcome this challenge. To overcome this challenge, an effective e-waste management technique by means of blockchain in the 5G scenario is proposed. The proposed solution tracks the e-waste produced and motivates people by providing incentives to them for channelizing the e-waste via agencies managed by the government that effectively dispose the waste in an environmentfriendly way. Henceforth, a partnership model is proposed for the implementation of this method which leads to increase in jobs as well as proper organization of unplanned setup that is with a large amount of prospective potential.
Praveen Kumare Gopalakrishnan, John Hall, Sara Behdad
Abstract Waste tracking is becoming an important concern for developed countries as well as developing regions, where municipalities aim to assure proper waste management considering environmental and economic objectives. Waste tracking is important not only for a transparent reporting system compatible with environmental regulations but also for economically viable waste collection and recovery solutions. In this paper, a waste tracking system based on the blockchain technology is introduced where different entities involved in the system will be able to retrieve required data from the platform and decide on their level of contributions. The conventional technologies do not provide a sufficient level of transparency and coordination among different entities. With the introduction of blockchain as a tamper-proof technology, municipalities can enhance the efficiency of their waste management efforts. The proposed blockchain technology can connect proper stakeholders towards collaboration and sharing information. The concept of a smart contract for waste management is discussed and further, a decision-making framework is developed to guide users of the system select proper services available to them, depending on the level of data sharing, cost, reliability, and the security level that they expect from the system.
Increasing popularity of cryptocurrencies lead to the rapid development of blockchain-based distributed ledger keeping systems. Industrial applications for the new technologies were soon found, enhanced by needs of security, trust and transparency along the value-chain in traceability of products, parts and processes, particularly when transactions are being maintained through several different entities. Traceability solutions are also increasingly being built upon IoT or IIoT platforms. Although this allows for highly modular and flexible architectures, severe security deficiencies make these designs inapplicable to most real-life production lines. Lack of research and practical advances in the creation of modular and easily deployable frameworks motivated development of the project underlying this dissertation.
Utkan Eryılmaz, Remco Dijkman, Willem van Jaarsveld, Wouter van Dis · 5 authors
Blockchain emerged as a peer-to-peer trust platform for trading virtual currencies and evolved to be used for different problems including supply chain provenance. Due to stringent requirements of safety, regulated manufacturing and service industries such as aerospace, healthcare, and transportation require regulated traceability for parts, from source to the last customer, with detailed information requirements for each handover and operation. In this research, we analyzed the current traceability problem and list use cases of a traceability blockchain platform. A prototype platform is developed for the aerospace industry where every single part is required to have source and path traces recorded by certified supply chain actors. We evaluate the efficiency benefits of the platform in terms of duration and address future research topics.
With our increasing reliance on technology, the amount of e-waste generated after their life cycle ends is increasing at an exponential rate. Going by this rate, we'll have an equivalent amount of carbon footprint as the transportation industry, only by the smartphone segment by 2035. We can imagine the total carbon footprint if we extend this to all the other numerous electronic gadgets we use. With the increasing volume of e-waste, the chances of these toxic non-biodegradable elements polluting the environment are astronomical. This problem is being addressed by various nations and laws to regulate the waste have been passed in recent years. The Indian Government has placed E-Waste (Management and Handling) Rules in 2011 which forms a part of the Environment Protection Act to ensure coherent disposal of e-waste. However, a rather large percentage of e-waste in India is still not regulated and it runs vastly by unorganized sectors. We provide a solution to the above problem by proposing an efficient e-waste management technique by using blockchain in the 5G scenario. Our solution keeps track of the e-waste generated and we provide an incentive-based system where users are encouraged to channelize their e-waste through government regulated agencies which efficiently dispose of them in an environment-friendly manner. We propose a public-private partnership (PPP) model for implementing this, which can generate thousands of jobs by organizing this unregulated sector with huge underlying potential.
Tharangana Perera, Sithija Piyuman Thewa Hettige, Shadhini A. P. Jayatilake, Wickramaranga Abeygunawardhana · 5 authors
Contemporary consumers are demanding greater visibility in products they consume, and practices used to produce them. Blockchain-based product traceability solutions attempt to integrate the data silos of suppliers into an immutable and distributed ledger to provide consumers with a transparent and trustworthy system to trace back a product at hand. A common limitation of these solutions is the use of blockchain to provide only the proof of existence of data. We propose a solution where data related to enforcement of product-quality specifications and production limits, merging and splitting products as batches, and mixing of ingredients are handled within the block-chain itself to provide greater consistency, transparency, and trust. Our solution is based on a graph data structure built into the blockchain nodes, smart contracts, and facilitation of different roles in a supply chain. We demonstrate the utility of the proposed solution by implementing it on the Hyperledger Fabric platform. Performance results confirmed that both the graph data structure and blockchain has acceptable throughput and latency characteristics.
Abstract The complexity of today’s integrated circuit (IC) supply chain, organised in several tiers and including many companies located in different countries, makes it challenging to assess the history and integrity of procured ICs. This enables malicious practices like counterfeiting and insertion of back doors, which are extremely dangerous, especially in supply chains of ICs for industrial control systems used in critical infrastructures, where a country and human lives can be put at risk. This paper aims at mitigating these issues by introducing Anti-BlUFf (Anti-counterfeiting Blockchain- and PUF-based infrastructure), an approach where ICs are uniquely identified and tracked along the chain, across multiple sites, to detect tampering. Our solution is based on consortium blockchain and smart contract technologies; hence, it is decentralised, highly available and provides strong guarantees on the integrity of stored data and executed business logic. The unique identification of ICs along the chain is implemented by using physically unclonable functions (PUFs) as tamper-resistant IDs. We first define the threat model of an adversary interested in tampering with ICs along the supply chain and then provide the design of the tracking system that implements the proposed anti-counterfeiting approach. We present a security analysis of the tracking system against the designated threat model and a prototype evaluation to show its technical feasibility and assess its effectiveness in counterfeit mitigation. Finally, we discuss several key practical aspects concerning our solution ad its integration with real IC supply chains.
Open access
Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) and Hardware Security
Adrian Hofmann, Fabian Josef Schatz, Axel Winkelmann
The blockchain technology has gained significant popularity among different users around the world by promising them a fully decentralized network independent from trusted third parties, governments or other central authorities. Instead of trusting a single instance, the trust is distributed among a large group of people, that validate transactions and add those to the blockchain. This process, referred to as "mining", has experienced trends of centralization, possibly presenting a major threat to the security and usability of blockchains. So far there is only a limited understanding of the mechanisms behind centralization of mining power. To better understand the underlying mechanisms, we investigated the major Proof-of-Work blockchains (Bitcoin, Ethereum and Litecoin) as well as their successful forks (Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin SV, Ethereum Classic). We found that the mining ecosystem seems to be self regulating and adapts timely to foreseeable changes. Only unforeseeable adjustments, such as a split of the blockchain, result in strong temporary fluctuations and centralization. Our results provide a thorough understanding of the mining ecosystem and gives reliable indicators for governance control in major public blockchains.
Bing Qing Tan, Fangfang Wang, Jia Liu, Kai Kang · 5 authors
The logistics industry around the world has proliferated over recent years as a large number of business organizations have come to recognize the importance of logistics. Cost control used to be emphasized to remain competitive, but recently green logistics has gained attention with the awareness of the integration of economy and society as a whole. Nowadays, green logistics is a useful concept to improve the sustainability of logistics operations, and its related policies and theoretical research have been investigated and explored. However, the practical applications of green logistics are impeded by real-time data sharing, which is common in the logistics industry. Blockchain technology is adopted to address this challenge and enable data sharing among related stakeholders. This paper presents a reference framework for green logistics based on blockchain to reach the sustainable operations of logistics, with the integration of the Internet of Things and big data. Finally, potential benefits and limitations are analyzed when implementing this framework.
Virgin polymers based on petrochemical feedstock are mainly preferred by most plastic goods manufacturers instead of recycled plastic feedstock. Major reason for this is the lack of reliable information about the quality, suitability, and availability of recycled plastics, which is partly due to lack of proper segregation techniques. In this paper, we present our ongoing efforts to segregate plastics based on its types and improve the reliability of information about recycled plastics using the first-of-its-kind blockchain smart contracts powered by multi-sensor data-fusion algorithms using artificial intelligence. We have demonstrated how different data-fusion modes can be employed to retrieve various physico-chemical parameters of plastic waste for accurate segregation. We have discussed how these smart tools help in efficiently segregating commingled plastics and can be reliably used in the circular economy of plastic. Using these tools, segregators, recyclers, and manufacturers can reliably share data, plan the supply chain, execute purchase orders, and hence, finally increase the use of recycled plastic feedstock.
Blockchain implications within the sustainability domain are rapidly arousing the interest of researchers and institutions. However, despite the avalanche of articles, papers, and recently published books, innovation in the blockchain domain is still heavily influenced by light literature, such as news, articles, opinion posts, and white papers. Lacking a homogeneous literature background, case studies often fall into storytelling, providing mere descriptions of the facts according to the writers’ impressions and opinions. We therefore investigate blockchain adoption for sustainable purposes through a case study while remaining firmly grounded in three main theoretical literature streams: knowledge management, knowledge infrastructure, and trust. Since blockchain interaction with the real world is managed by oracles, addressing the oracle problem is essential in order to evaluate the effectiveness of blockchain for sustainability issues. However, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, no other paper has efficiently addressed this subject or even mentioned it. Recognizing its scarce consideration in the literature, the oracle problem will be analyzed in both theoretical and practical terms, thereby providing a way to solve the issues related to non-fungible products in the supply chain. Choice over the selected case study was made in light of the divergence in motives for the adoption of blockchain (economic over social), which makes the results more inferable at a broader scale and offers an insight into how sustainable innovations can also be economically viable.
Growing environmental awareness and widening extended producer responsibility have heightened the need for economically, environmentally, and socially sustainable business strategies levered by digital technologies. As an extension, various take-back policies focusing on product waste and recovery are put in place by the high-tech manufacturing industry. With an attempt to increase sales while ensuring the environmental sustainability of products, trade-in programmes that incentivize consumers to exchange used goods for new and most recent technology products became a value-adding strategy for businesses. Due to the high unpredictability in the quality of returned devices however, determining trade-in margins is a challenging task for original equipment manufacturers (OEMs). This inevitably reveals the need for incorporating intelligent technologies into the formation of manufacturing and logistics architectures to simultaneously preserve OEMs profitability and ensure the sustainable development of the closed-loop supply chain activities. With this motivation, this study presents the use of IoT-embedded products in a blockchain-enabled disassembly-to-order system to determine the optimal trade-in-to-upgrade policy. A discrete-event simulation model is developed to obtain the expected cost of the disassembly-to-order system. Optimal incentives for varying product qualities are then computed by utilising this cost in the trade-in policy model.